Advanced Social Media

First of all, I'm not even close to an expert on social media. But at the recent Pennwriters Conference, I attended a workshop titled Advanced Social Media presented by Don Lafferty. I'm going to sum up just a fraction of what Don shared but if you visit his website you'll find lots more.

Don is a HUGE proponent of Facebook advertising. He shared some numbers about 'Likes' on your Facebook author page. It seems around 1,000 Likes is a milestone for a dramatic increase in web traffic coming from FB to your site. He said one of the most important things you can do is use FB to gather emails.

Despite Don's big push for spending money on paid Facebook advertising, he emphasized that email is still the leading and most powerful marketing tool. Getting people to sign up for email alerts and newsletters should be one of your goals.

Don also gave some advice about websites. He said to include a books page, an events page and of course, a short bio. And try to have everything important above the scroll. Again use your website or blog to entice readers to sign up for those emails.

Don't also suggested you repeat all Facebook posts on Google+. Google doesn't search FB but it loves all the content on Google+.

Don put forth a way to calculate how much money you should be spending a month on advertising. I think I dropped my pencil when I heard his estimate. It was way out of my budget.

Do you pay for Facebook advertising? Has it worked? Do you have an email list of readers? Do you use Google+? Want to like my Facebook page? I'm a long way from that 1,000 mark.

I'll be out of town on Friday so I'm not posting that day but I'll be around to visit.